Trump Golfs. You Pay. Here's the Bill.

The receipts on 403 days, two terms, and a quarter-billion taxpayer dollars torched!

Listen to the audio version here

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Stop. Once every four days. That is how often the President of the United States has been on a golf course since the day he took the oath. Read that again. One. In. Every. Four. And this weekend, he is heading out to golf again.

Since his January 20, 2025 inauguration, public records and White House pool reports counted 110 confirmed golf days across roughly 14 months in office as of late March 2026. He returned to a single course 56 times: Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach.

A HuffPost analysis built on the Government Accountability Office’s 2019 cost study placed the taxpayer tab at $101.2 million as of March 28, 2026. That number has only climbed since.¹

The independent tracking site DidTrumpGolfToday.com, using broader cost categories, puts the running total above $144 million. At his current pace, Trump is on track to torch $300 million of your money on golf before this term ends on January 20, 2029. Three hundred million dollars. That figure pays for Air Force One operations, the C-17 cargo flights that haul his armored motorcade vehicles, Coast Guard sea patrols around Mar-a-Lago, local police overtime, and Secret Service lodging at the very resorts he personally owns and profits from.

Now look at the per-trip damage. Each weekend at Mar-a-Lago, with the rounds at his West Palm Beach course thrown in, runs $3.4 million in travel and security. Per. Weekend.

As of late March 2026, HuffPost counted 17 Mar-a-Lago trips Trump made strictly for golf and another seven that combined other stops. Bedminster, New Jersey added eight trips at $1.1 million each. Doral, Florida added five trips at $2.7 million each.

The single most expensive excursion on the books is the July 25 to 29, 2025 trip to Scotland. Trump flew Air Force One across the Atlantic to open the New Course at Trump International Golf Links in Aberdeenshire, the course named for his late mother, Mary Anne MacLeod. Price tag for American taxpayers: $9.7 million for what the White House called a five-day work trip. HuffPost called the trip a marketing photo op for his private business. The watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and ethics lawyers from both parties agreed.

Air Force One, the modified Boeing 747, costs $273,063 per hour to operate. Every Florida round trip burns roughly four flight hours on that meter. That’s $1.1 million in aircraft time alone, before you factor in security and lodging. CREW reported in February 2026 that the Secret Service has already paid close to $100,000 directly into Trump Organization accounts in the first months of this term. Money out of your wallet. Money into his bank account. You are paying him to vacation at his own resorts, and he is profiting on both ends of the transaction.

Now wind the clock back. The first term followed the exact same playbook over four years. From January 20, 2017 to January 20, 2021, Trump spent 293 days golfing at his own resorts. He visited Trump Organization properties on 428 of his 1,461 days in office. That works out to nearly one in every three days of his first presidency at a location he personally profited from.

The HuffPost analysis using the same GAO methodology placed the total first-term taxpayer cost at $151.5 million. The GAO confirmed in its 2019 audit, report number GAO-19-178, that just four early Mar-a-Lago trips in 2017 ran $13.6 million combined, an average of $3.4 million per trip. That’s the exact same per-trip rate he is charging taxpayers right now. CREW separately documented that the Secret Service alone paid close to $2 million directly to Trump-owned businesses for accommodations across the first term. On some nights, Trump’s hotels charged the government $1,185 per room. The House Oversight Committee found that figure ran more than five times the federal per-diem rate for the same dates.

In August 2016, standing on a campaign stage, he looked you in the eye and promised he would be too busy working for the American people to ever play golf.

Eight years and two terms later, that broken promise has personally cost American taxpayers more than a quarter of a billion dollars at a sport he plays at clubs he personally owns. Every dollar came out of your pocket. Every hour on the green stole time from the Oval Office work he was elected him to do. Let that land.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

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1. Sources verified April 25, 2026: HuffPost analysis by S.V. Date (March 28, 2026, “Taxpayers’ Tab for Donald Trump’s Golf Habit Crosses $100 Million”); HuffPost (July 25, 2025, Scotland trip cost analysis); Government Accountability Office Report GAO-19-178 (February 2019); Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reports (February 2026 FOIA report on second-term Secret Service spending; August 2023 first-term Secret Service spending report); House Oversight Committee letter to Secret Service (October 2022, $1,185/night rate finding); DidTrumpGolfToday.com tracker; Wikipedia: Donald Trump and golf (cross-referenced); Wikipedia: Trump International Golf Links, Scotland; Trump Organization press release (July 29, 2025, New Course opening); CNN and Washington Examiner archives of Trump’s August 2016 campaign quote. Figures for the second term are the late-March 2026 totals and have grown since.